Customer Reviews

Lala Pipo

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This book really changed my life. It gave me a whole new perspective on the relationship between Japanese and American culture. In such a thoroughly postmodern novel, which emphasizes misinterpretation and misunderstanding between different sections of humanity, we see a fascinating portrayal of the forces that push and pull on people and in fact, organize entire societies. Reminded me of the work of one of my favorite Japanese novelists, Riyu Murakami. In the end, "Lala Pipo" or "A Lot of People" evolves into a disorderly celebration of humanity. Fabulous translation job, as well.

Buy it - it will open your eyes and give you plenty to think about!

Lala Pipo is a very dirty book. It's got a strange fascination with the entanglement of ordinary people and extraordinarily perverted sex. But Lala Pipo isn't a pornographic book per se, it's intent is more to explore than excite. Told in a series of interweaving stories Lala Pipo follows several very lonely people as they try to connect to the world around them. Their intersection with others often happens sexually and almost always has an unhappy ending.

Author Hideo Okuda does a fantastic job of weaving these short stories into a cohesive whole. Rather than a book of six short stories Lala Pipo is a complete novel where each character gets their own complete storyline and several events are seen from more than one perspective.

If you're easily offended by sexuality then obviously Lala Pipo won't be for you, but for people who think literature shouldn't shy away from dealing with the sexual relationships between people Lala Pipo is worth checking out. I found it to be a well written, engaging and entertaining book.

Lala Pipo's deceptively simple, pop style packs some carefully measured and meted surprises. Tarantino meets O. Henry with each punch-in-the-face plot twist. This is clever, fast reading that haunts long after it's been taken in. I was shocked in all the right places by this unorthodox, underground view of Japan.

Hideo Okuda's novel Lala Pipo takes place within the environs of Shibuya, one of Tokyo's 23 special districts and one of the most fashionable and trendy areas within the most populated metropolitan area in the world. With its brightly lit skyscrapers, colorful billboards, and lurid neon lights, Shibuya is a place that does not rest and as long as one's wallet of purse is full of 10,000 yen bills, it can offer the visitor any kind of decadent pleasure he or she desires. However, for the protagonists of Lala Pipo, Shibuya is little more than a gaudy and degrading husk that contains their sorrow and broken dreams and, in Sayuri Tamaki's--the protagonist of chapter 6--opinion, the other dwellers of Shibuya, despite their money and trendy clothes, are just as miserable as she is.

The book opens with a chapter titled "What a Fool Believes" after the Doobie Brothers song, with the 32-year-old freelance writer Hiroshi Sugiyama ploddingly typing a review article for a product he has never used. Earning only a meager living through his writing, Hiroshi does little to improve his station in life because he bears the burden of a crushing social anxiety disorder which keeps him from being able to interact with his bosses and fellow writers at his office and with most other people in general. Therefore, Hiroshi spends his free time hiding in three or four public libraries reading long running collected volumes of manga and paperbacks which he, with his paltry income and high rent cannot afford. Hiroshi would have probably lived this way indefinitely if not for his upstairs neighbor Kenji Kurino. Hiroshi only "meets" Kurino in passing, but Kurino's life, or it might be better to say his vigorous sex life, opens a "new world" for Hiroshi one night when he can make out a girl's moans coming from his ceiling. Feeling a stir in his nether regions, which he had not felt in a long time, leads him to masturbate that night. After finishing, Hiroshi experiences a contented afterglow which he had not felt for a long time. Hiroshi listens to Kurino have sex each night and his masturbation becomes more fulfilling after he begins stalking the girls leaving Kurino's apartment for the train station. Not to grope, but to ogle so his masturbation fantasies can be stronger. He personally would not have a shot sleeping with Kurino's multitude of girlfriends, but at least he can enjoy them in his mind while they make love to Kurino above his ceiling. However, these fantasies suddenly turn to nothing when Kurino one day unexpectedly moves out and thereby leaving a lonely Hiroshi completely alone.

As evidenced in this first chapter, the pages of Lala Pipo are filled with sex. However, the sex is neither the highly eroticized couplings found in the works of Yukio Mishima or Junichiro Tanizaki nor the somewhat sterile sex scenes found in the works of Murakami Haruki. Instead, the sex is more like the dirty sex found in the "other" Murakami's, Ryu Murakami, novels: an unloving, rough coupling without a trace of affection. For Hiroshi, and the novels other five protagonists which includes a housewife making rough pornographic films and a overweight woman making fetish videos with unsuspecting partners, sex is nothing but an activity to pass away the time and to help them forget the day to day drone of their humdrum lives. However, the methods they use in order to fill this emptiness lead to even more disappointment and, in some cases, ruin the small traces of happiness that they do have.

Writing in a harsh, plebian style that goes out of its way to shock the reader out of his or her comfortable position as an observer, especially Western readers who are unfamiliar with the seedier aspects of Japan, Okuda fills the six interwoven chapters of Lala Pipo with extraordinarily flawed characters whom could be looked upon as personifications of the social ills of contemporary Japanese society, such as Hiroshi being a hikikomori--a shut in-- an individual who is unable to deal with the outside world because he is afraid of the ridicule of others and Yoshie Sato being an "abandoned housewife whose life is empty after having spent the most fruitful years of her life cooking and cleaning for her husband who she dislikes. However, instead of just trying to make the reader feel pity for his characters, he also shows how the characters in some ways damned themselves thus making the reader contemplate his or her own life as well.

While not for the prudish or the faint of heart, the release of Lala Pipo into the literary market by vertical is a good step in showing some of the "pulpier" novels in Japan which garner higher readerships than some of the more high brow works that were the primary focus of publishing companies just a few years ago.

I've always been bothered by the myth that Japanese are unemotional robots. They don't give in to public displays of emotions but that's because they prefer to show reserve. Wearing one's heart on one's sleeve is deemed immature here but that doesn't mean Japanese people don't have a heart bursting with hope and despair and the two books reviewed below shows this.


DESPAIR: A review of Lala Pipo

Lala Pipo follows six people living near the Shibuya district of Tokyo. They are losers, plain and simple; they seek to fill the emptiness of their lives with loveless sex. They don't even crave sex as a sport, they crave it as a means to happiness.

We follow a young recluse who can't relate to people who has a porn scout living in the apartment above his and is ashamed that he can only get a fat girlfriend. The novel then shifts to the porn scout as approaches girls to place them in hostess bars getting a cut of their pay, hoping to get one who'll agree to do porn so that he can get a cut of that. Next we follow one of the porn stars he manages, a 43 year old woman who is totally disconnected from her family and in despair gets a neighbor to set fire to her house. We then follow the arsonist, a poor unassertive young man who works in a karaoke bar that doubles up as a brothel. We then follow a brothel patron, a prolific writer of erotic novels. He is prolific because he dictates his novels and has the tapes professionally transcribed. He aspires to write literature but instead meets his middle age crisis by paying for sex with high school girls. The novel loops to a close with the story of Sayuri, the girl who transcribes the writer's tapes, and who turns out to be the fat girlfriend of the first chapter's recluse.

All these people are pathetic losers and looking at their lives, I felt I was looking at a peep show. Sayuri isn't quite the victim the others are, she has no delusions about her life and accepts to play the hand she was dealt. She betters herself, but her approach to life is ultimately as cynical as that of the others.

Depressing? And then some. What saves the book is a willingness to look at the consequences of cynicism. This is not some facile polemic work decrying the evils of the sex industry in Japan; it is a reminder that the people in that industry are not so different from ourselves and that the despair can have tragic consequences.

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HOPE: A review of Love Letters at Sixty

This is a charming little book that presents a selection of love letters by people in their sixties to their spouses. It presents in the rawest way what many older men and women worry about and how they feel about each other.

Many of the letters are simple expressions of gratitude to the spouse for having been by their side all these years. Men thank their wives for having cooked and kept house for them, while wives thanked their husbands for having slaved away their lives in an office 16 hours a day for forty years.

The most poignant story was a couple who thirty years before had lost their ten year old son to heart failure. The woman cried and cried and took over two years to get back to a semblance of a normal life. The father stood by her, solid as ever and she resented him for not sharing her grief. When she again started feeling that life offered hope for happiness, he caught her smiling. At that moment a pensive look appeared on his face and he looked sad. The wife asked her husband what was wrong he replied that he was thinking of their dead son. The wife flew into a rage: now you are crying? Only now, after two years you start to cry? You unfeeling bastard, I hate you. The husband apologized to her and replied that he had to be strong for her sake, that he had to be a rock for her, and now that happiness was slowly returning, he felt he could allow himself to grieve. The wife broke down and realized how wrong she had been to hate her husband and fell in love with him all over again. The whole situation is unmistakably Japanese, but who could say that there are no feelings?

Someone I know left Japan after living here many years, saying that she found no love in this country. This book proves her wrong.

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A final word

Both of these books were unfortunately made into bad movies. Love Letters at Sixty (the movie) replaced the raw honest innocence of the book with maudlin over-the-top sentimentality. Lala Pipo (the movie) did away with the pathos of the book and turned the work into a burlesque sex comedy.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

The overt sexual content in 'Lala Pipo' sometimes overshadows the twisted pursuit of fortune and happiness in the novel. And although I wasn't really rooting for any of the mostly-unlikable and pathetic characters, I did enjoy the way the author tied it all together in the end. Even the most prudish members of my book club agreed that it was a compelling read.

This is such a good book. I honestly didn't think it would be so good but it is. They just made a movie of it in Japan, though it looks terrible, which is sad because the book is great. It follows through interconnected stories and it is great.

we need more of this kind of japanese literature to be translated into english, a fantastic read that keeps you turning the pages...highly recommended.